Thursday, November 7, 2013

What is a good definition of syntax?I have looked it up online and can't find a straight forward answer.

The universal definition is as follows:

A systematic, orderly arrangment.

The definition that applies to literature and grammar is as follows:

The rules and/or patterns used to form sentences in a language.

For example, English uses the pattern of subject, verb, direct object in the creation of sentences.  Change the order of the sentence and you change the meaning:  "Dog bites man" means a very different thing than "man bites dog".  However, in other languages, there are different rules governing sentence order.  In some languages, reversing the order would not reverse the meaning - it depends on the syntax of that language.

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